A data-driven approach on COVID-19 restrictions and its effectiveness in Latin America

The global coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic (COVID-19) has profoundly affected the world, impacting not only public health and sanitation, but also government policies. Countries have had to implement new rules and regulations to manage the disease, leading to debates about the effectiveness of these measures in curbing the spread of the virus or the potential to inadvertently exacerbating a global crisis. The objective is to analyze the effectiveness of Latin American countries’ public health strategies in mitigating the impact of the pandemic. To this end, data on the measures implemented by these countries and their impact on infection rates are examined. The analysis considers the suitability of these strategies to the specific sociocultural and economic realities of each region, with a focus on techniques such as time series analysis and clustering. The databases used in this study are from Our World in Data, an open-access public data repository. The results suggest a correlation between the reduction in preventive measures against the spread of COVID-19 and the subsequent increase in cases, possibly due to the ease of restrictions that resulted in an increase in infections or other variables not included in the analysis.